Bonnie McKee – American Girl

Okay, so we have mixed feelings on the whole America thing…

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[4.88]Katherine St Asaph: Studio songwriters have two hurdles to clear if they’re to succeed solo. The first they share with all aspiring pop stars: build a compelling persona and fanbase. (Persona compels fans; fans compel labels.) The second is thornier. By the time a songwriter amasses the clout to go solo, all their vocal stylings and songwriting quirks have been so thoroughly codified by their clients — and as any freelancer knows, the more clients you have the better — that they’re cliches. Unless you ace #1, you sound generic — even pointless. (Put another way: Ke$ha aced #1. Jessie J did not.) So while “American Girl” is credited to Bonnie McKee, it clearly belongs to Katy Perry. The sunny backing vocals are beamed in from “California Gurls”; the riff is borrowed from “Teenage Dream,” or at least what “Teenage Dream” borrowed; and the whole thing’s like a song-length summary of Nitsuh Abebe’s Vulture piece on Perry’s all-American girlhood. McKee either fixes this or really, really doesn’t by having Katy — along with one-third of the music industry — lipsynch the song for her in the video. (The video’s cameos fall into two categories: those like KISS and Joan Rivers who are there for OMGWTF value, and those like Perry and Ke$ha who are there to lure their respective fanbases’ YouTube views. Again, this is either helpful or really, really not.) There are really only two traces of Bonnie. The first is that slightly unfortunate whistle register toward the end, something she tends to do. The second, more promising, is the lyric. McKee’s always been among the smarter pop writers, and here she delivers a conceit perfectly suited to the times: when American Girl is a Mattel trademark, the Bling Ring kids are national antiheroes, when R. Kelly lyrics are folk mottos, and when it’s genuinely unclear whether lines like “I was raised by a television” or “I wanna buy a new heart out of a vending machine” are satirical or sincere. “I fell in love in a 7/11 parking lot, sat on the curb drinking Slurpees we’d mix with alcohol”; yes, McKee’s engineered that memory like a studio pro so everyone can relate (well, for us it was the Raygo lot) — but that’s the point. No wonder the American boy lasts one throwaway line; this is a love song, but a love song to the monoculture, as the new American Dream. And damned if Bonnie doesn’t make it shine so bright.
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Anthony Easton: Three things that make this more interesting than it has any right to be: a) that tiny little whispered coda; b) the unironic irony of a work that loves and seeks to critique the world-consuming empire of American culture; c) the Pro-Tooled up to eleven formalism of the “shine so bright” section.
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Patrick St. Michel: As pop, it’s serviceable albeit redundant, the music here sounding like a castoff from the Katy Perry or Carly Rae Jepsen camps. As a Radio Disney-friendly version of Ke$ha, it’s even better, as Bonnie McKee spikes her Slurpee and refuses to “listen to mommy” — which, geez, “mommy,” really? As some sort of testament to America, it’s boneheaded to the point of hilarity. “I’m loving taking over the world” could be subversive sung by someone who didn’t shout out a convenience store in the first line of her single, while McKee flexes her freedom of speech by… wanting to buy something out of a vending machine. As political commentary, it’s out of place, McKee singing about being “raised by a television” and “everyday” being “a competition”, like those vague thoughts somehow say anything at all. Overall, it’s just a bland mess.
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Alfred Soto: American girls who sit in the curb drinking spiked Slurpees and don’t listen to mom and are always ready to party are fantastic subjects and objects, so long as they don’t accept the labels and tags imposed on them by male songwriter and producers interested in marketing to demographics. At least Ke$ha isn’t interested in syntax.
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Will Adams: This is the sound of an A+ student operating as she usually does. “American Girl” is palpably calculated, employing every smash hit trope imaginable. The songwriting is taut but dense, featuring a double chorus, a leaping melody, and hooks peppered in everywhere else. The lyrics take the familiar approach of juggling personal branding with populism, and only succeeding partway with both – she means “suburban American girl,” of course. Bonnie’s performance offers enough of the familiar – do I even have to say who she reminds me of when she stabs at the Slurpees with alcohol line? – while carving out her own brand of bratty imperialism. The production is the sound of now: Dr. Luke sheen and heavy compression. You can see the gears turning, sure, but that doesn’t make the moving parts any less shiny. “American Girl” is a fine pop song that any artist would kill to have. Moreover, it’s refreshing to hear one of the best in the business get her own say.
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Brad Shoup: Wielding one section too good to be true (the American-woman-as-startup bit) and a bunch of phrases too clever to land (those relating to TV and vending machines), “American Girl” is the sound of a diffusion line achieving self-awareness. The third chord comes after a hesitation; perhaps that’s long enough to disrupt the perception — very likely to occur — that you’re hearing a mashup of Lana Del Rey and “This Kiss”.
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Jonathan Bogart: I’m not surprised that many of the people who have benefited from her injection of hyper melody and stitched-together phrasing into their massive chart hits would appear in the video. It gives it something the song itself — as a song, as a performance, as a delivery system for personality — entirely lacks: star quality.
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Jonathan Bradley: Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream, Nitsuh Abebe once said, “made being young, drunk, and starry-eyed sound incredibly wholesome — as if Girls Gone Wild videos long ago joined baseball, apple pie, water parks, and early Mellencamp in the canon of Americana.” Bonnie McKee co-wrote three of the singles from that record, so it’s no surprise that her tribute to American femininity should mine from the same seam, though since she’s not blessed with Perry’s knack for sounding implausibly bubbleheaded, McKee sounds like she’s aware of the tensions the latter glides over. Part of the fun of “American Girl” is how shamelessly it evokes this frisson, how it adds details that make the protagonist sound dumber and the writer sound more deliberate: the action starts in a 7/11 parking lot, because “it’s a free country,” but it’s also a country that values convenience and immediacy and has a culture latently puritan and car-dependent enough that parking lots are expected but sitting in them to drink a spiked Slurpee is a violation of so many of its social norms. And yet this is a song about being the embodiment of social norms, that declares in its second verse a fealty to the pursuit of happiness as well as personal independence and that it is only reasonable to trade in one for more of the other. But this is celebration, not satire, and McKee pulls up just shy of doing anything more serious than winking at these motifs. “American Girl” conjures a haze of ever-present Americanness without actually commenting on it, which is a bit cheap, but also a rather knowing enunciation of how malleable yet evocative the adjective “American” can be.
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